Is embedding thumbnails of published Engage possible?
May 22, 2012
We are in the middle of re-creating our current website into a brand new one. The company creating our website is using Word Press to create our new website so that we can go in and control the content we publish, etc.
Meanwhile, I created about 10 Articulate Engage interactions that I want to include on one of the new pages on our new website. Our website company found an Articulate plug-in available to use for Word Press so that we can embed these projects into our website without the need to go into an LMS system. I felt that embedding these projects directly into the site was going to be WAY more effective than diverting them to an LMS.
The problem, however, is two fold.
1. When i upload my finished Articulate Engage interactions, they are huge. I'm thinking that when they are embedded, they go in in full size. When I view one on our website, it's cut off and includes a horizontal slider. That's just not gonna work.
2. Because these projects were embedded in full form, it appears that as soon as you open the page that includes our Engage interactions, they all begin to play the introductions that I included in each project automatically. They activate before one of our website visitors can chooses to interact with a selected Engage project.
I want to know if there is a way to simply embed a thumbnail or something of each of my finished Engage projects so that our users can just open the page and see all the Engage interactions available to them and then select to activate the one they choose to activate? Also, if this is possible, I would not want these to open in a whole new tab or window. If it can just expand into it's full size then be closed back to a thumbnail-like size, that would be ideal.
Are there plug-ins or anything available like this that can make this possible?
Thanks!
8 Replies
Hi Josh -
Take a look at this Screenr to see if this is something that will help:
Also wanted to see if you saw this thread: http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/13148/78115.aspx#78115 where we use a screenshot that includes a link out to the actual course. I used Storyline in that example, but it could just as easily been an Engage project.
Do you have a link you can share so we can see what you're doing?
hey, thanks for the reply! I'll check this out.
http://ehdi.wh-21.com/hearing-for-the-lifespan/
here's a link to the page that we're working on. right now, there is only 1 engage project uploaded on it. There are a total of 10 final engage projects but I stopped uploading as soon as I noticed the problem with this first one.
as you can see the size of the thing is huge. but more importantly, because all but may one or two of my Engage projects include introductions, I can see that I'm gonna have a problem with the automatic playback once the webpage opens up. if i were to have all 10 of these projects available on the same page as I envisioned (available for our users to browse and pick which one they are interested in activating) then as soon as the page opens up, I'll have like 8 of these automatically activate on their own and play 8 different introductions at once, over one another. it would make for a terrible jumble of audio.
i'm trying to get this squared away before our website goes live.
I checked out the screencast and that is basically I want/need. I forwarded this screencast to our website programmer for him to look over.
however, do you suggest or recommend that I move all of my Engage projects into their own Presenter file and publish from there? I ask because it appears that all the screencasts i've seen discussing roughly the same concern are using Presenter. Was curious if Engage embedding and playback might present more difficulties than Presenter embedding/playback.
oh, sorry, i should clarify the screencast i watched. it was the one contained in the thread you linked to above, not the thickpress thing.
You can totally use a published Engage interaction as it's own, standalone file. You dont need to go through Presenter.
Now, if you wanted to load or show, say multiple Engage presentations using Presenter's menu, then that would be a good idea. But for single interactions, I would publish as standalone files.
And thanks for the clarification re: screencasts. I'm a big fan of controlling the overall thumbnail position of files and linking to actual projects rather than try to embed them into the site.
had another question. I saw in the screencast about creating a bumper or placeholder (which essentially is exactly what I want to do) you had created two html image files of your published Presenter files...is that something I should let our programmer look at or can I do that on my own?
I only ask because I'm not sure how you went about creating that. I know that in Microsoft Word, for example, it gives me the option to save a document as a web file. but, i am unsure how you did that for your screencast demonstration.
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